The White House said that Mr. Rove would consider an interview for this article if it were conducted off the record, with the provision that quotations could be put on the record with White House approval, a condition it said was set for other interviews with Mr. Rove. The New York Times declined.
The article itself is not so much, Rove isn’t in great demand except in the White House. But the quote quote struck me as pretty interesting. Media manipulation is no longer behind the scenes – it’s a matter of policy.
In the military, there was a term I hadn’t encountered before – short. In the service, barring your untimely death, you always know your DEROS [Date of Effective Release of Service, I think]. It means when you’re going to get out. So, as you approached this date, you were known to be short [as in, a short-timer].
It had a specific meaning. People who were short would do their job, but nothing extra. They were unusually calm, unfettered by the crisis mentality otherwise prevelant in day to day military life. They weren’t intimidated by superiors, were indifferent to lesser ranking people, and were detached from the mission at hand. I wasn’t in combat, but I suspect they play it very safe there too.
George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and many of the other Administration types are acting like they’re short already – unavailable, detached, going through the motions. They’re going to leave this mess they’ve created behind. While they’re perfectly capable of trying to go to war with Iran, their part in it will be ‘hit and run’ – ‘hit’ Iran then ‘run’ from office. Rove wouldn’t have pulled such an arrogant press maneuver as this in the past. What do they care?
For that matter, when did they ever care? Only now, being short, it’s even less…
[…] Recently, we heard that Rove’s influence was fading [see short…]. Today, we hear the same thing about Cheney [Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned]. After Rumsfeld’s disasterous speech last week, Rummy’s surely not in charge either. Who does that leave us with to run the show? Surely not George Bush. Frankly, I don’t believe any of this really. They just muddle along, doing the same things day after day. Journalists write about them. We rave about them. Right Wing bloggers defend them. But the net result is that, as a group, they’re doing very little governing. They’re mostly up to their ears politicking – rationalizing some stupid thing they’ve already done or scheming about doing some more of it. In their six years, they’ve brought nothing brilliant to the table – no solution to some problem we really have. They’ve mainly focused on their hawkish, quasi-religious, and conservative agendas – giving us little that actually responds to the country’s needs. […]